The Manufacturing Process of Zirconium Beads

The zirconium beads as the grinding media play an essential role in the grinding by the bead mill machine, especially those with consistent density, uniform size, and high spherical degree. Under the excellent performance of each component of the bead mill with the proper ratio of solid and liquid, adding an adequate amount of zirconia beads provides collision, shearing, and extrusion force on the solid particles in the grinding slurry thereby allowing them to reach the ideal particle size.

It catches great curiosity how the micron zirconia beads get produced. What is the manufacturing process for the beads with tiny diameters? Here comes. There are three common techniques to produce zirconium beads, titration molding, pressing forming, and rolling forming.

Titration Molding

The zirconium beads made by advanced titration molding usually have good smoothness and roundness, which is conducive to ensuring the overall quality. In such a process, the zirconium bead slurry is dripped into the liquid solution and then formed in one step. This can make the internal structure dense and uniform thereby strengthening the beads’ physical properties including the hardness, crushing strength, and wear resistance.

Therefore, the titration molding is more suitable for zirconium bead production. However, the time interval in the titration may affect the production efficiency. Besides, it is easy to control the particle size of the zirconium bead as the diameter of the titration needle can be directly adjusted. And there is no need to screen out the targeted size. The zirconium bead adopting this manufacturing process is suitable for grinding and dispersing the electrode materials, paints, capacitor materials, etc.

Rolling

It is an important manufacturing process for mass production of zirconium beads in China. Although the production cost is lower with fast production speed, the strength and density of the beads produced may not be as good as that of the other two manufacturing processes. For the beads' size, it can reach the micron level. It is made similar to the principle of "snowballing". When the control is not in place, the zirconium beads produced may have many holes inside, which affect the basic indicators of zirconium beads such as wear resistance and crushing strength.

Pressing

It is suitable for producing zirconium beads with larger sizes, or zirconium balls. There are usually two types, dry pressing and isostatic pressing. The capital investment of dry pressing is relatively small and the process is simple and convenient. The zirconium beads produced by isostatic pressing are higher and more uniform in density, with performance and quality better than that of the dry pressing.